Film Reviews by griggs

Werner Herzog’s early films always feel like he’s testing how much madness an audience can take before walking out. This one’s no different. He gathers an all-dwarf cast in a remote institution where chaos slowly takes over — cars spin in circles, chickens run riot, and laughter turns to screams. It’s anarchic, strange, and hard to look away from.

There’s something compelling about watching order collapse, even if it’s never clear what Herzog’s after — human nature, power, or just striking images.

Even Dwarfs Started Small is more curiosity than crowd-pleaser. It’s ugly, absurd, and oddly poetic in that singular Herzog way. I wouldn’t hurry to rewatch it, but it’s impossible to forget.

During a high-adrenaline caving trip, six women find themselves trapped underground after a sudden rockfall seals their only escape. The Descent takes that simple premise and pushes it to the limit, turning claustrophobia into a weapon — every crawlspace tighter, every breath harder to take. Twenty years on, the once-cutting-edge terror feels more familiar — a kind of horror imitated so often it’s started to show its age.

The first half — before the monsters appear — is the most compelling and nerve-shredding. The tension builds naturally and the panic feels real. But once the creatures arrive, the film loses that delicate edge. What starts as psychological and primal gives way to jump scares and gore — effective for a moment, then gone, like echoes in a cave.

It’s easy to see why The Descent made such an impact at the time: it’s visceral, nasty, and beautifully shot. Yet revisiting it now, it feels oddly tame. The scares no longer burrow under the skin, and the shock tactics carry less weight. I watched the original UK cut with its bleaker ending — the one that lets the darkness win — and it fits. The Descent is a reminder that cinema, like the caves it explores, can thrill you and wear you out in the same breath.

For a so-called “revisionist western,” this one still feels a bit conflicted. A Man Named Horse wants to show cultural respect, but it never fully escapes the sense of an outsider looking in. Richard Harris throws himself into the role of an English aristocrat captured by a Sioux tribe, slowly earning his place among them. It walks a fine line between sincerity and spectacle.

The rituals are filmed with care, and there’s genuine effort to portray something deeper than the usual cowboy clichés. Still, it feels slightly exploitative — maybe because there’s no real acknowledgment or thanks to the Sioux nation for what the film takes from their culture. The intentions are good, even if the execution wobbles.

I came across it thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s recommendation, and I’m glad I did. Fascinating, flawed, and very much of its time — a western trying, and only half succeeding, to grow up.

There’s something dreamlike and quietly unnerving about Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. It’s a horror film that doesn’t shout or stab — it drifts. Zohra Lampert gives an extraordinary performance as a woman trying to rebuild her life while the world around her slips into something strange and possibly haunted. She’s so open, so fragile, that you almost want to step into the frame to protect her.

Visually, it’s weirdly gorgeous — all faded colours, soft light, and that hazy, early-’70s melancholy. The horror seeps in slowly, like a bad dream you can’t quite wake from. The score sounds as if it was recorded somewhere between the living and the dead, deepening the trance.

It’s not flawless — the pacing drifts and the ending wavers — but there’s a quiet power in its uncertainty. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is less about scares than atmosphere, and it casts a spell all its own.

A House of Dynamite looks great — sharp performances, slick production, and a real sense of confidence. But once the novelty wears off, it starts to feel like a loop. Told through overlapping perspectives, each segment revisits the same crisis from a new angle — clever in theory, less so in practice. You keep waiting for fresh insight, but it’s mostly déjà vu — just lit better.

There’s no denying the talent involved — the cast delivers and the production is top-notch — yet it never really ignites. The repetition dulls the tension, leaving you admiring the craft more than the storytelling.

Stylish, ambitious, unmistakably Bigelow — A House of Dynamite smoulders when it should detonate.

Short, bright, and buzzing with slot-machine energy, Viva Las Vegas flashes by in a blur of lights and quick cuts. At just 85 minutes, it’s one of Elvis’s shortest films, and you feel it; between the pacing and the neon glare, it’s easy to get cinematic whiplash. Elvis plays Lucky Jackson, a race-car driver trying to win both a Grand Prix and Ann-Margret’s heart, and he does a fine job of pouting his way through both.

Director George Sidney brings his MGM musical flair — plenty of colour and motion, if not much story. Still, it’s hard to mind when Ann-Margret is on screen. As Rusty Martin, she’s magnetic, bursting with life, and clearly having a ball. She practically dances circles around Elvis, who looks both smitten and slightly out of his depth. Their chemistry, both on and off screen, gives the film its spark.

It’s all gloss and speed — fun while it lasts, if a little shallow. The songs, especially the title track and “C’mon Everybody,” are the real show. Viva Las Vegas shines when it stops pretending to tell a story and just revels in the music, movement, and glittering absurdity of mid-’60s Vegas.

The Offence is one of those films that gets under your skin and stays there. Sean Connery produced it himself, bringing back Sidney Lumet — who’d directed him in The Hill (1965) and later The Anderson Tapes (shot after but released first) — to tell a story stripped of glamour, full of guilt and decay. Connery plays a detective chasing a child killer, only to find the real rot is in his own head.

It’s a bleak, airless film — all grey skies, empty rooms, and faces worn down by years of compromise. Lumet keeps it tight and tense, relying on long silences and close-ups instead of easy shocks. By the end, the interrogation feels more like a breakdown than a climax.

Connery’s performance is astonishing — angry, broken, and completely without vanity. In a film this bleak, his rawness hits even harder. The Offence doesn’t comfort or explain; it just stares right into the dark and dares you to do the same.

Angst drops you straight into a killer’s head and doesn’t let you out. The voice-over tracks his twisted thoughts while the camera glides behind him like a ghost, unnerving and precise. At just 75 minutes, it wastes no time — every second feels sharp, deliberate, and a bit too close for comfort.

There are no names or backstories, just raw obsession and impulse. The steadicam work gives it this horrible intimacy, like you’re seeing through his eyes but wishing you weren’t. It’s the kind of film that makes you tense without realising why — and the sound has a lot to do with it.

The electronic score pulses and loops with eerie detachment. It wraps around the images like a fever dream, amplifying every breath and movement until it’s sensory overload.  Sound and image pull you under, their rhythm both mechanical and disturbingly human.

Strangely, they didn’t bother translating the title for English audiences, and rightly so. “Angst” means “fear” in German — and that’s exactly what this is. Not anxiety, not dread, just fear in its purest, most physical form.

In Affliction, Paul Schrader leads us through a blizzard of bitterness and regret. Nick Nolte plays a small-town cop losing his grip, haunted by family trauma and a father (James Coburn) whose cruelty still echoes through every conversation. Their scenes together feel less like dialogue and more like old wounds reopening.

Schrader adapts Russell Banks’s novel with icy precision — snowbound roads, pale light, and faces that seem carved from frost. The performances are superb, especially Coburn, who gives the film its frightening pulse. Yet for all its craft, Affliction keeps you at a distance, too bleak and restrained to fully thaw. You watch with admiration rather than involvement.

It’s a grim study of masculinity and moral decay, and it hits all the right notes. Affliction impresses more than it moves — leaving you chilled, if not entirely stirred.

Few films get working-class life quite as right as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It’s full of smoke, laughter, and bad decisions, with Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton lighting it all up. He’s cocky, charming, and completely fed up with doing what he’s told — the sort of bloke who’s great fun to watch, but hell to know in real life.

Karel Reisz keeps things raw and real, turning factories, terraced houses, and noisy pubs into something alive and crackling. Alan Sillitoe’s script, from his own novel, nails that mix of frustration and fun — social realism with both attitude and heart. Every line feels sharp, every scene has a spark.

The dialogue still pops (“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”), and the film’s rebellious streak feels as fresh as ever. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning isn’t kitchen-sink drama — it’s British New Wave, working-class defiance bottled and set alight.

Alejandro Amenábar’s debut feels like the work of someone who already knows exactly how to mess with your nerves. Tesis follows a university student researching violent media who stumbles onto something far darker than she bargained for. What starts as a harmless project turns into a slow, creepy descent full of dusty VHS tapes, hidden rooms, and that uneasy thrill of watching what you shouldn’t.

The story revolves around the myth of “snuff movies” — those rumoured films that supposedly show real murders. None have ever been proven to exist, but the idea alone is enough to get under your skin. Amenábar uses that urban legend to explore our own morbid curiosity — how easily the line between observer and participant starts to blur.

He builds tension with a steady hand, skipping cheap scares in favour of atmosphere. Ana Torrent sells the whole thing with a perfect mix of curiosity and fear, while the dark, narrow corridors and grainy lighting do half the work. It’s never gory — the real horror is what you think you’ve seen. Slick, stylish, and unsettling throughout.

Still, Tesis can’t resist explaining itself a bit too much. Sometimes you wish it trusted the audience more. But as first films go, it’s sharp, confident, and knows exactly when to hit pause.

Stephen King clearly has a thing about writers and hotels, and 1408 proves he still gets plenty of mileage out of both. John Cusack plays a jaded author who checks into a supposedly haunted hotel room, only to find it’s far more than a marketing gimmick. The scares come less from jump cuts and more from watching him slowly lose his grip — and his bravado.

Director Mikael Håfström keeps it simple and claustrophobic, letting the weirdness build until you’re not sure what’s real anymore. Cusack’s dry humour and mounting panic do most of the heavy lifting, making the madness strangely believable.

It’s hardly the most original haunted-hotel story, but it doesn’t try to be cleverer than it is. 1408 just gets on with being creepy, and it does it well — a decent ghost ride that’s short on clichés and long on atmosphere.

Hitchcock’s early tale of kidnapping and conspiracy may be modest in scale, but it brims with tension and atmosphere. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) opens in the snowy calm of St. Moritz before hurtling back to London’s fog and backstreets, where the Wapping scenes give it a raw, lived-in energy that lingers.

You can see Hitchcock honing his craft — the visual wit, bursts of menace, and sly humour threaded through the suspense. It’s lean, tightly paced, and full of moments that would become hallmarks of his later style. The climactic siege in the Tabernacle of the Sun, loosely based on the Sidney Street shoot-out, still feels sharp and unnervingly modern in its staging.

Peter Lorre, fresh from M, steals the film with a performance both charming and reptilian — the kind of villain who smiles just before he bites. Rough around the edges, yes, but unmistakably the work of a director already plotting his way to greatness.

The Shout begins, improbably, with a cricket match at a rural asylum — leather on willow masking something far stranger beneath. The cast drew me in, but I stayed for Jerzy Skolimowski’s rhythm — part folk horror, part fever dream, entirely his own. The match acts as a framing device, and for once it works — cricket and madness feel made for each other. Unease creeps in quietly, between polite conversation and the whisper of the countryside.

John Hurt and Susannah York play a couple whose quiet life in a Devon village is upended by Alan Bates’s Crossley, a stranger with a hypnotic stare and an even darker story. He claims to have lived among Indigenous Australians — described through the film’s very ‘70s lens of exotic mysticism — learning to kill with his voice. Whether true or delusional, it’s hard to say. Bates’s calm, almost courtly delivery makes the horror believable. York, meanwhile, brings her usual cool intensity, continuing the psychological disintegration she began in Images. Skolimowski toys with sound from the start, layering music, noise, and silence until the whole thing hums with menace. Fleeting appearances from Jim Broadbent and Tim Curry add depth and humour.

The Shout is part home invasion, part hallucination. It’s eerie, sensual, and just absurd enough to work. Proudly strange — a distinctly British slice of insanity — polite on the surface, deranged underneath.

Some films simmer; this one just broods. At Close Range takes the true story of a small-town crime family and turns it into a slow, moody clash between fathers, sons, and bad choices. It’s part crime drama, part family tragedy — with tractors, beer, and bad ideas standing in for destiny.

Sean Penn is excellent as the kid trying to break free from his father’s shadow, while Christopher Walken oozes menace as the charming psychopath pulling the strings. His usual rhythm and delivery stick out here more than usual — and not in a good way. It’s all a bit much, and that moustache really isn’t helping. Still, when the two share the screen, the tension’s thick enough to cut with a penknife.

The pacing’s slow, but it fits. James Foley shoots rust, mud, and cloudy skies like they’re part of the story. It’s gritty, tragic, and quietly haunting — a small-town nightmare that stays with you.